5 Small Business Tips for Better SEO in 2017

Hannah | Friday 13th January, 2017

From content to search, there are a few clever SEO tricks small businesses can apply in 2017 without huge time and cost implications.

1. Revisit existing content

The rise of ‘content marketing’ has largely resulted in a surge of tick-box content that is underwhelming for the audience. This allows an opportunity for the smart small business to take the time to revisit older content to improve.

It is a good idea to review what content currently drives traffic to your website and check which keywords are currently driving traffic to certain pages of your website and see where you rank. As a free option, you can use Google’s Search Console to see which keywords are sending you traffic.

Explore keywords that are relevant to your user. Supplement your content with strong imagery, videos, and other media to soon see the results.

Whilst others are obsessed with getting the next piece of content out, you’ll be building on your existing content to make it stronger. This will result in a more relevant result for the user, a more informative piece for others to link to, and therefore a more relevant result for the search engine to display.

How do you rank locally?

So many businesses fail to register/claim their business online, and this can lead to missed opportunities when it comes to local rankings. Moz is a free local listing checker so check your business here to see if your business is on the map.

Ensure that you claim your listings, and make sure that each profile is up to date with consistent information. Also, make sure your profile has extra content such as photos, brochures, opening times, etc. and you will improve your visibility online.

Optimise your titles, URL and descriptions

This is probably one of the oldest tips in the SEO industry, but it is still the most important. You need the following:

A unique and meaningful title

A catchy description

A well formatted URL

Then ask yourself:

Is it descriptive?

Is it catchy and friendly to the user?

Does it give the user a very good idea of what the website is about without clicking?

Optimise for voice search

Due to a huge rise in mobile search, we can’t ignore this any longer. Research has shown that we’re becoming much more savvy in using our smartphones to find what we want. More are now using virtual assistants such as Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, to find the information they need.

It’s noticeable by the data being gathered, that we use more words when searching for things by voice, because we speak in a natural conversational tone, as opposed to a shortened keyword search. For example, it is more likely that when typing a keyword search we would type ‘Thai restaurant London’ as we’ve become more web savvy over the years. However, when using voice search we’re more likely to talk in a conversational tone, such as, “What are the best Thai restaurants in London?”.

By answering frequently asked questions for your users on key service and product pages, you’ll be able to capture extra traffic.

Watch your speed

A common problem is a lack of awareness for page speed, and the positive and negative effect that speed can have not only for your users, but also for your rankings.

Google suggests that page speed is a ranking signal, and they provide a free tool to measure ‘PageSpeed’. Here you can identify how fast or slow your website is, and can take the necessary actions to improve it.

To start with, optimise your images. Make sure they are the right file format and compressed for the web. PNG’s are generally better for graphics and JPEGS are better for photographs.

Programs such as Photoshop and Pixlr (free) will help to compress the image size right down with not a lot of loss in quality. Be wary that many cameras take photos that are around 3-5mb in size and uploading these direct to your website can slow it down.

Have a great weekend. Please feel free to submit any questions below that you may have about Search Engine Optimisation in 2017

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